Thomas Ondrey/Plain Dealer ReporterBen Tedrick, a biologist with the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District, checks on the brine shrimp growing in a water-testing lab at the district's Southerly Wastewater Treatment Plant in Cuyahoga Heights. The brine shrimp are raised only as a food source for minnows that are used to test the toxicity of the nearby Cuyahoga River, where the treated sewage is emptied.

The Year of the River

This is one of a series of stories The Plain Dealer will print this year as a part of "The Year of the River," a recognition of the Cuyahoga River's return to health 40 years after it caught fire.

CUYAHOGA HEIGHTS -- Once every few months, biologist Ben Tedrick and his colleagues carefully raise 2,000 fathead minnows in their government science lab -- and then calculatingly dump them into pools of treated sewage water.

Just to see what happens to them.

But this is no act of animal cruelty -- this is how the 1972 federal Clean Water Act works in 2009 on the Cuyahoga River.

Nearly four decades after the landmark legislation was approved by Congress -- arguably in partial reaction to the Cuyahoga River fire of June 22, 1969 -- the Clean Water Act still guides water quality on the Cuyahoga, in Lake Erie and every other waterway and wetland in America.

On the Cuyahoga, that means live fish testing.

Tedrick is one of about two dozen scientists who work at the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District's water quality lab on East 49th Street. The building is about halfway up a hill from the sprawling Southerly Treatment Plant, one of the nation's largest.

Southerly sits right on the Cuyahoga, emptying an average of 125 million gallons of wastewater each day (the plant can treat a daily maximum of 400 million gallons) directly into the river.

The water coming out of the sewer plant is now clean enough that it almost never harms the little silver and black fish in Tedrick's plastic pools. He and the other scientists monitor their growth as they swim in the treated sewer water and compare them to a control group of fish raised in tap water.

"When we have detected a level of toxicity, it is so marginal, that we're not even sure that it is toxic at all," said Keith Linn, an environmental specialist at the lab who has been with the district for nearly 30 years. "Each time we have found toxicity, we've sent the water to be tested by an independent lab and they found nothing."

Which is good for the fish -- both in the lab pools and in the Cuyahoga River.

Thomas Ondrey/The Plain DealerA plecostomus fish, at front, cleans algae from the breeding tank of the smaller fathead minnow, rear, at a Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District laboratory in Cuyahoga Heights. The minnow (Pimephales promelas) is the species of fish used to test the toxicity of the Cuyahoga River because of its lack of tolerance of pollution. Scientists at the lab raise the minnows specifically to later put them in treated effluent to see whether the wastewater affects their growth.

Fish mean clean river

It is the return of fish to the Cuyahoga -- more than three dozen species were found last year just in the river segment between Akron and Cleveland -- which environmentalists cite as the most convincing proof that 40 years of reversing pollution on the river is working.

Fish and invertebrate life in the river has gone from virtually nothing (other than pollution-tolerant "sludge worms") to marginal to thriving in some areas of the river, although the shipping channel in Cleveland remains mostly bare.

Still, organizers celebrating "The Year of the River" and a general return to health along the 100-mile river, including improvements in that lower portion, say they owe a large portion of credit to pollution reduction forced by the Clean Water Act.

"The Clean Water Act made a big difference early in the effort to clean up the Cuyahoga," said Jim White, executive director of the Cuyahoga River Community Planning Organization. "By directing large amounts of money and enforcing regulations against polluters, the federal government had the muscle to make things happen."

Predecessor to Clean Water Act altered how U.S. treats water

Congress passed a set of amendments to the Water Pollution Control Act (now the Clean Water Act) in the fall of 1972 -- radically altering the way America treated its vital waters.

Its simple aim: "restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of our nation's waters" by reducing pollution and adding guidelines for measuring and regulating those pollutants.

Until 1972, untreated sewage -- both human waste and byproducts of industrial processes -- was routinely being dumped into not only the Cuyahoga River, but most other waterways, leaving two-thirds of all the lakes, rivers and coastal waters in America unsafe for fishing or swimming.

"There were already existing clean water acts, but they didn't really have the teeth," said Adam Rome, a historian at Penn State University. "The Clean Water Act really ratcheted up enforcement."

Many experts say it remains among the most successful pieces of environmental legislation in U.S. history:

• From 1970 to 1985, the percentage of the U.S. population served by wastewater treatment plants rose from 42 percent to 74 percent.

• The number of U.S. rivers and lakes that are safe for fishing and swimming has risen by more than 70 percent since the early 1970s, the EPA has said. (Even so, environmental groups have contended that nearly one out of three rivers and lakes in the United States remain inhospitable to swimmers, native fish and other wildlife.)

The Clean Water Act also came packaged with one other essential element: money.

From 1972 to 1989, the federal government spent $56 billion on municipal sewage treatment, according to one report. Total federal, state, and local expenditures were more than $128 billion.

-- Michael Scott

Much of that muscle was used initially on the Sewer District, which was also created in 1972 (under Cleveland's name initially) and remains the biggest local player required to comply with that comprehensive federal law.

The district takes in all the sewage from Cleveland and 60 surrounding suburbs -- both residential and industrial -- and treats it at Southerly and two other smaller plants.

The district's first cleanup priority in the 1970s was to upgrade its treatment plants and then build new, improved sewer pipes -- called interceptors.

"In the end, we spent roughly a billion dollars on each," said Rick Switalski, manager of sewer design for the district. "The money was really flowing freely from the federal government back then."

But early enforcement of the Clean Water Act along the Cuyahoga also meant more confrontation with industrial polluters, who for years could discharge any substance into the river without consequence.

"We put a few people out of business in the early days -- we had to," Linn said. "There were some pretty bad players, but now it's more about keeping people in business, but making sure they are in compliance."

The sewer district now monitors more than 900 industries that discharge into the system -- most of the pipes going directly to Southerly.

District scientists began using the fish tests in the 1980s, though they are only one of dozens of water tests at the end of the treatment process.

"This is one way of showing that we're meeting the Clean Water Act," said Linn.

The lab work, of course, is only a way to measure what the huge treatment plants do by removing chemicals and bacteria that still course into the plant through a vast underground network of pipes.

Sewer district officials and environmentalists, however, have in recent years begun to turn their attention more to pollution going into the river and lake from above ground -- runoff that includes pesticides, much of it suburban storm water.

To that end, the sewer district is proposing a regional stormwater plan for Cleveland and the suburbs. "That's the next thing," White said. "How we use our land -- and how it affects water quality, is where the next improvements are going to come under the Clean Water Act."

Experts say that will make life in the river even better still.

But even now, it's far better than "the bad old days" on the Cuyahoga, Linn said.

"When I first started, almost no metals were being removed from the wastewater going into the river -- and a lot of those things were extremely toxic to whatever aquatic life was out there already struggling to survive," said Linn. "Today, there are virtually no metals being released into the water after our treatment.

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